Day 19 – little helper clean_gc

We at STATWORX work a lot with R and we often use the same little helper functions within our projects. These functions ease our daily work life by reducing repetitive code parts or by creating overviews of our projects. At first, there was no plan to make a package, but soon I realised, that it will be much easier to share and improve those functions, if they are within a package. Up till the 24th December I will present one function each day from helfRlein. So, on the 19th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

What can it do?

This little helper frees your memory from unused objects. Well, basically it just calls gc() a few times. I used this some time ago for a project, were I worked with huge datafiles. Even though we were lucky enough to have a big server with 500GB RAM, we soon reached its limits. Since we typically parallelize several processes, we needed to preserve every bit and byte of RAM we could get. So, instead of having many lines like this one:

gc();gc();gc();gc()

I wrote clean_gc() for convenience. Internally, gc() is called as long as there is memory to be freed.

Some further thoughts

There is some debate about the garbage collector gc() and its usefulness. If you want to learn more about this, I suggest you check out the memory section in Advanced R. I know that R itself frees up memory if needed, but I am unsure what happens if you have multiple R processes. Can they clear the memory of other processes? If you have some insights on this, let me know!

Overview

To see all the other functions you can either check out our GitHub or you can read about them here.

Have a merry advent season!

Über den Autor

Jakob Gepp

Numbers were always my passion and as a data scientist and statistician at STATWORX I can fullfill my nerdy needs. Also I am responsable for our blog. So if you have any questions or suggestions, just send me an email!

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